Activities, the Services We Will Be Proposing

¶ … activities, the services we will be proposing will deal with a certain set of activities that a working individual has less and less time for and will be tempted to turn to a specialized company that will help him deal with such kind of activities. Paying bills, shopping for groceries and other needed products in the house, requiring information to the banks for credits or payment options, going with the car to the car service -- these are the sort of activities that the modern individual has less and less time for and is more and more inclined to simply outsource.

As such, our company will deal with providing all these types of services for our customers, services that are likely to create more leisure time for the working individual and remove the unnecessary hours spent dealing with the home administrative problems.

This introduction already gives a little insight in the targeted consumer. This is obviously the working person, male or female (if both individuals in a family are working it is even better), any individual aged 20 to 60 years old, who spends more than eight hours in the office. The service is also extended to any older individual, whose physical handicaps may be of such a nature that they cannot perform all these administrative actions on their own.

Promoting the service is one of the initial endeavors worth seriously considering. How do you promote the services? In my opinion, there are two ways, depending on the two separate categories of consumers we have differentiated so far. For the working individual, spending most of his time in front of the computer at work, the service will be promoted online. However, one of the easiest ways to promote a service, namely the door-to-door advertising is referred to as spam in Internet jargon. In this sense, it is best that the newly created company will use a website to promote its services. Note however that the creation of a website is not enough to ensure that the people in need will actually find out about the services offered by the company. In this sense, we need to refer to something called search engine optimization (SEO), which basically presents optimizing ways by which our site can be included in search engines' first pages during keywords searches. A specialized company can deal with this, since its time consuming and specialists do the job better.

For the second category of targeted consumers identified so far, the older individuals or the handicapped ones, generally people spending more or their time at home, but whose physical difficulties do not permit them to perform their administrative functions, the door-to-door presentation is well-adjusted to face the requirements. Indeed, specialized teams can go from house to house and present the company's offer: the services, the way these are performed, the staff, the prices and any other informatory requirements the clients may have.

The main threat we see from potential competitors is the fact that many banks and utility facilities have already developed the technological apparatus to process electronic payments. This means that the employee will never actually have to leave his chair at work or his computer in order to pay his bills and, in many cases, he will also be able to buy his groceries online.

On the other hand, the opportunities that such a market offers are virtually unlimited and it will take a long time before the companies involved can actually electronically cover everything. In this sense, especially in the case of older individuals, a service that performs all administrative acts and simply brings home the purchased products or the bills is always an actual one.

One of the important issues to be considered when launching such a business is the logistics aspect. If we look only at the marketing, promotion and advertising aspect, we will require a search engine optimization (SEO) team, preferably outsourced to an outside company, a door-to-door marketing team and an overall coordinating team, who will meld both branches of the marketing activity.

This is just for the marketing part. Additionally, logistics will be involved in day-to-day operations, referring to receiving the orders, accounting for them, passing them along to the person who will be making the deliveries, etc. In terms of planning, a computer software can eventually be used so as to generate the best results and reduce the possibilities of orders not being completed.